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A divine visitation and a brief encounter on the 1st April 1972,​via The Daily Telegraph & the TV documentary on the Papacy.

For about seven years prior, I had serviced a local Church of England in almost every aspect of her life, resulting in a calling to become an Anglican priest, a missionary and join the VSO, that in some way the Holy Spirit affirmed it would encompass all three, with a conviction that I was to remain in England at all costs. The latter two years I helped found a Christian Training Centre in which the premature death of its founder a former Church Army Officer precipitated me into an unexpected leadership role to continue with the ministry which he founded. Events dramatically unfolded in which I was wrongly accused in irony, very much in the likeness of the accusation made against the Biblical Joseph in Egypt, which to this day in 2013, still remains.At that time I was swiftly led away from this venture to a beautiful Gloucestershire farmhouse to consider my future. In this farmhouse, I was awoken early one morning by a unique Voice which uttered, ‘I will supply all your needs.’ I quickly arose from my bed looking to see if someone had entered my room, but I was restrained in a position not of my own will. The same voice then entered into my head through my heart and hovered in front of my face and continued; ‘ Complete the work which I had begun.’ I was then able to arise out of my bed and quickly wrote soberly in my diary the voice as; Holy, Fatherly, Ageless, full of Wisdom and Authority. This I felt was God the Creator speaking to me in the English language.About two years after, I considered the ‘…work’ was to ‘revise’ the Book of Common Prayer, the Church of England’s Prayer Book since 1662, and so I asked God to confirm that this was what he had in mind. Thus I compressed these seven years into a definitive ‘prayer of faith’ on the Saturday before the above date. My father, a very godly man, from whom I inherit all my convictions from his spiritual integrity, whom knew not of this presiding prayer at the time. On a Saturday, it was the custom in our home for my father to read The Daily Telegraph first, after which I would only glance at its picture pages which it featured at the time, I rarely read the papers at all, but when I came across the main article relating to what many felt was a very unsuccessful attempt at the revision of this 400yr old Prayer Book, I saw immediately this to be an irrevocable sign from the Almighty acting in providence to endorse my vocation. For the first time I felt the severity of what I was being led into. I pondered deeply at the immediacy, clarity and appropriateness of such an endorsement, for I clearly saw that The Daily Telegraph, the Book of Common Prayer and the Church of England were all very deferential in character, a ‘Trinitarian’ endorsement.. I felt the deepest presence of the Most High and in a fraction of a moment, I acknowledged that if one had been chosen for this particular task would it also indicate becoming a future Archbishop of Canterbury.Having spent some time in reading this article and offering to God this spontaneous prayer, I noticed that my father had drifted into a quiet slumber and that the TV had also muted. For a very long period some ten to twenty minutes, a caption of the silhouette of a man had laboured on the screen with no explanation as to what had happened to the presiding programme. As I pondered upon this caption I felt it held a faint resemblance in outline to a self portrait which I had sketched only a few years earlier, ( Joseph ) However at length the length the caption finally gave way to a documentary entirely upon the Papacy! I was immediately thrust into a devastating conviction that what God was alluding to by this ‘Brief encounter,’ was the impossible endorsement that I would one day become this person also!!! I cast this devastating experience into the furthermost parts of my mind until 1999, when I realised that my vocation spanning 30yrs would lead me to this very position.Only in 2004, I visited my local library to trace this documentary and to my utter amazement discovered there to be no record of such a TV programme. What had happened must be this documentary had replaced a scheduled programme. To my profound thoughts entered this engagement which I also only knew about in 2004. That same afternoon, a scheduled film was also about the Queen visiting the Far East. Shanghai in China is where I was born and our family lived and first came to England in 1954, the same time frame as Her Majesty’s Accession and Coronation.

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